Andrei Codrescu

By Brian Bouldrey. Brian Bouldrey's most recent book is "Monster: Adventures in American Machismo." He teaches in the English department at Northwestern University | April 14, 2002

Casanova in Bohemia By Andrei Codrescu Free Press, 321 336 Pages, $25 Giovanni Giacomo Casanova was a villain. Granted, he was a charismatic villain, the kind of cad who seems isolated, monstrous in his own milieu, perhaps more acceptable in another time or place. Instinctively, Andrei Codrescu presents Casanova in Bohemia as a man in his old age trying to escape his time and place. He writes his memoirs and casts his thoughts into a future he believes will be full of...

My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy by Her Sons, Daughters, and Lovers Edited by Rosemary James Touchstone, 178 pages, $13 paper Rosemary James and her husband, Joseph DeSalvo, own Faulkner House Books, a hearth of literary New Orleans. For this collection in response to Hurricane Katrina, James solicited work from an array of figures. Some are well-known--writer Roy Blount Jr., restaurateur Ella Brennan, musician Wynton Marsalis, journalist Walter Isaacson--others less...

By Wilton Barnhardt. Wilton Barnhardt is the author, most recently, of the novel "Show World." | February 28, 1999

MESSIAH By Andrei Codrescu Simon & Schuster, 366 pages, $25 With the millennium so close, you can bet we`ll be hearing a lot more talk of messiahs. While some wait for the End Times, Rapture, Tribulation and the like, there's another camp of millennial cheerleaders who focus on the good news: that if the Antichrist is coming, then the True Messiah, to do battle, must be right around the corner too. Or are we expecting too much of this poor overdue man or woman? The Western Christian world...

Andrei Codrescu's weird new comic novel, "Wakefield" (Algonquin, 288 pages, $24.95), dusts off a timeless (some would say shopworn) theme -- a man makes a pact with the devil -- and from there veers, with mixed results, into an on-the-road adventure and sociological exploration of some of the maddening aspects of late 20th Century American life. The book opens with Satan coming to take Wakefield, a neurotic, alienated motivational speaker given to rambling discourses that seem alternately to...

Having an academic male feminist review a novel about Casanova (Books, April 14) is like presenting a cat with a bird. Happily (for the bird), professor Brian Bouldrey, the reviewer of my "Casanova in Bohemia," is a pretty lame cat. After declaring the historical Casanova a villain, and my fictional Casanova a villainous attempt to salvage the villain, he can't contain himself until he has branded Casanova a "rapist." He cites an incident from Casanova's own memoirs, about a young woman who rejected him. The...

National Public Radio made an on-air apology Friday evening for a commentator's remark on the return of Christ, after the Christian Coalition complained that the comment was anti-Christian. The remark by humorist Andrei Codrescu occurred Tuesday during a commentary on NPR's highly popular program, "All Things Considered" Codrescu, who is on contract with NPR but not a fulltime employee, said during a discourse on Christian theology: "The evaporation of four million...

By Brian Bouldrey. Brian Bouldrey's most recent book is "Monster: Adventures in American Machismo." He teaches in the English department at Northwestern University | April 14, 2002

Casanova in Bohemia By Andrei Codrescu Free Press, 321 336 Pages, $25 Giovanni Giacomo Casanova was a villain. Granted, he was a charismatic villain, the kind of cad who seems isolated, monstrous in his own milieu, perhaps more acceptable in another time or place. Instinctively, Andrei Codrescu presents Casanova in Bohemia as a man in his old age trying to escape his time and place. He writes his memoirs and casts his thoughts into a future he believes will be full of...

Having an academic male feminist review a novel about Casanova (Books, April 14) is like presenting a cat with a bird. Happily (for the bird), professor Brian Bouldrey, the reviewer of my "Casanova in Bohemia," is a pretty lame cat. After declaring the historical Casanova a villain, and my fictional Casanova a villainous attempt to salvage the villain, he can't contain himself until he has branded Casanova a "rapist." He cites an incident from Casanova's own memoirs, about a young woman who rejected him. The...

By S.L. Wisenberg. S.L. Wisenberg is a visiting scholar in gender studies at Northwestern University. Her fiction collection, "The Sweetheart Is In," is forthcoming in the spring | September 10, 2000

THE DEVIL NEVER SLEEPS: And Other Essays By Andrei Codrescu St. Martin's Press, 244 pages, $27.95 One of the world's more interesting places, I was thinking after I began Andrei Codrescu's latest essay collection, must be inside the author's mind. And then, about a third of the way into the book, I happily came across a description of that very thing: "I am convinced that a structural analysis of my mind would reveal a glistening fish on a platter next to a large onion below a hanging...

The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape By Andrei Codrescu Addison-Wesley, 216 pages, $17.95 The exiled Romanian poet Andrei Codrescu presents himself in this series of linked essays as a veteran of two totalitarian systems. The first one doesn`t worry him. "I am writing this literally in the ruins of the Communist world, in my hometown of Sibiu, Romania," from which he fled to the West in 1966, he writes in his foreword datelined Dec. 31, 1989. The second...

By Wilton Barnhardt. Wilton Barnhardt is the author, most recently, of the novel "Show World." | February 28, 1999

MESSIAH By Andrei Codrescu Simon & Schuster, 366 pages, $25 With the millennium so close, you can bet we`ll be hearing a lot more talk of messiahs. While some wait for the End Times, Rapture, Tribulation and the like, there's another camp of millennial cheerleaders who focus on the good news: that if the Antichrist is coming, then the True Messiah, to do battle, must be right around the corner too. Or are we expecting too much of this poor overdue man or woman? The Western Christian world...

Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century By Andrei Codrescu Hyperion, 193 pages, $19.95 The idea behind this book is intriguing, though it's not very original: to travel across America visiting interesting and odd things, then write a book celebrating their weirdness. But what makes "Road Scholar" different is its author, Andrei Codrescu, who is an American original even though he was born in Romania. Codrescu is a professor of English, even though it...

In early 1990, Andrei Codrescu arrived in Chicago to do a commentary for National Public Radio on a key 20th Century work-"Golden Bird," the sculpture by fellow Romanian Constantin Brancusi that the Art Institute of Chicago had just purchased for a record $12 million from the Arts Club of Chicago. "It was a time when Eastern Europe was boiling over," Codrescu recalls, "and I was expressing some hope that that spirit the `Golden Bird' embodied was going to be felt in the regions of optimistic...

National Public Radio made an on-air apology Friday evening for a commentator's remark on the return of Christ, after the Christian Coalition complained that the comment was anti-Christian. The remark by humorist Andrei Codrescu occurred Tuesday during a commentary on NPR's highly popular program, "All Things Considered" Codrescu, who is on contract with NPR but not a fulltime employee, said during a discourse on Christian theology: "The evaporation of four million...

Andrei Codrescu's weird new comic novel, "Wakefield" (Algonquin, 288 pages, $24.95), dusts off a timeless (some would say shopworn) theme -- a man makes a pact with the devil -- and from there veers, with mixed results, into an on-the-road adventure and sociological exploration of some of the maddening aspects of late 20th Century American life. The book opens with Satan coming to take Wakefield, a neurotic, alienated motivational speaker given to rambling discourses that seem alternately to...

`Road Scholar," the film starring Andrei Codrescu and a huge red Cadillac, opens with one of the wry touches that make it as welcome on TV as a clean rest stop on a forlorn highway: The poet is watching footage of a horrible accident. Instilling fear the old fashioned way-with cautionary carnage-is one technique the United States uses to teach its unlicensed to drive. And Codrescu, to get this quest for quirky Americana under way, must first learn the rules of the road, even though it means yielding a part...

My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy by Her Sons, Daughters, and Lovers Edited by Rosemary James Touchstone, 178 pages, $13 paper Rosemary James and her husband, Joseph DeSalvo, own Faulkner House Books, a hearth of literary New Orleans. For this collection in response to Hurricane Katrina, James solicited work from an array of figures. Some are well-known--writer Roy Blount Jr., restaurateur Ella Brennan, musician Wynton Marsalis, journalist Walter Isaacson--others less...

Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century, by Andrei Codrescu, with photographs by David Graham (Hyperion, $12.95). When approached by the documentary filmmaker Roger Weisberg, who proposed a driving trip across America with film crew in tow, the author, a poet and English teacher in New Orleans and a commentator for National Public Radio, had to look hard at the implications: "All my life I had two claims to fame: I was born in Transylvania and...